Drop pill is a kind of traditional dosage form of Chinese medicine preparations, which is widely accepted due to its advantages such as a short production cycle, a rapid onset of action, a high drug stability and a portable storage.
The existing drop pill production methods are generally a method of natural dropping combined with liquid cooling, or a method of pressurized dropping which is developed from the natural dropping combined with liquid cooling. The disadvantages of the existing apparatus are as follows: (1) according to a characteristic of liquid cooling medium, a range of pill weights of drop pills dropped in this cooling manner is limited, i.e., pill weights are generally 20˜30 mg, whereas neither micro pills nor large pills can be dropped; (2) meanwhile, in order to ensure a dropping effect, it is necessary to add a lot of matrix into a raw material of liquor, resulting in a small drug-loading capacity per unit and a correspondingly increased dosage; (3) furthermore, when the liquid cooling manner is used, a liquid-solid separation for separating drop pills from cooling liquid is necessary, but it is difficult to perform a complete separation between them, and thus the cooling liquid residue inevitably occurs on the drop pills and the drop pills are polluted; (4) when a yield is required to be adjusted, the traditional dropping apparatus commonly can adjust it only by changing a dripper and a pressure, hence a dropping frequency is low; in addition, the apparatus needs a large heat-exchange surface area of paraffin, thus a cycle efficiency is low and a power consumption is high, accordingly, the apparatus has a large volume, which likely possesses dead spots inaccessible to a clean process and a possible risk of cross contamination.
At present, a development trend and a research direction for improving the drop pill apparatus are how to improve the existing dropping apparatus in terms of improving its stability in a dropping process, efficiently increasing a formation quality of the drop pills, improving the production speed and the drug-loading capacity, and widening a range of droppable sizes of the drop pills, while reducing power consumption and the usage of cooling liquid as well as preventing the drop pills from pollution.